healthcare

“My Job Is to Break Healthcare”

The Resonance Test 24: Robin Glasco

May 11, 2018

byLee MoreauKen Gordon

Robin Glasco is a superhero. She goes where the love is. She is fearless, this Chief Innovation Office of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Glasco is out to redesign healthcare, and she recognizes that this monumental task involves risk, collaboration, experimentation, and trust. She and Continuum’s Lee Moreau talk it all out in the latest iteration of our Resonance Test podcast. Here are some of her super remarks:

• “I really want to reinvent healthcare, and [to do that] you gotta be risky, you gotta have some fearlessness to you. If you’re into sports it’s kinda that Cam Newton pulling back that Superman pose that he does. I’m all down for that, so that’s how I leverage that in my world.”

• “My job is to break healthcare.... And by that I mean the status quo is not acceptable in healthcare.”

• “I’m not trying to perfect the pager,” she says, adding: “A good part of my role is the help the organization see that ‘the pager’ is not a viable, sustainable business model for us.”

• “Anyone in healthcare needs to spend time with physicians, working in that environment.”

• “Truly when human-centered design just becomes part of your DNA is when we don’t have to be there along the way, holding their hand.”

• “Health is a 360, 24-7 experience journey.”

• “There aren’t any winners in healthcare right now. There is pain across every step, every spot in the journey of healthcare.”

• “This is not the Robin Glasco Innovation Center. This should be a community asset that people should embrace and be able to see themselves as a part of.”

About the Author

Lee Moreau

Principal

Lee Moreau is a Principal at Continuum, a global design and innovation consultancy. An architect and strategist, Lee combines a unique capacity for complex-systems thinking with a deeply empathic perspective, which he uses to critically engage and re-imagine the contemporary world.

Through research, analysis, and imagination, Lee helps Continuum’s clients understand their entanglement within their own complex set of cultural, material, and economic circumstances. Lee has led service design projects for a diverse group of clients that blur the boundaries between content and experience.

Ken Gordon

Content, Conversation, and Community Strategist

Ken makes Continuum’s work visible to the necessary people. He creates superlative content, works with colleagues to do the same, and employs social networks to share it widely.

A card-carrying humanist, Ken co-founded QuickMuse, the improvisational writing website, and JEDLAB, the Jewish education community. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, the New York Times, and many other pubs.

Ken has an English degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MA in English from the State University of New York at Albany. He framed both diplomas long ago, but can’t seem to find them now—a fact he considers all-too-human.